An addition to that: If we look through the goggles of Sara Ness’ Relating Languages, the rationalist style of doing conversations is at the far end of the internal-focusing dialects Debater/Chronicler/Scientist. In my experience, more gooey communities have way more Banterer/Bard/Spaceholder-heavy types of interactions, which focus more on peoples’ needs in the situation than on forming and communicating true beliefs. People don’t necessarily know which dialects they speak themselves, because their way of interacting just feels normal to them, and everyone else weird. It’s hard to learn speak in dialects that are not your natural default. For example, I didn’t even notice myself slipping into Bard/Banterer during writing this post, but in hindsight it’s fairly obvious how it digresses from the LessWrong language game.
I think the LW-way is ideal for its purpose, but I’m realizing that there’s a whole lot of tacit knowledge and implicit norms involved in understanding and doing it. This strong selection for a particular style of communication may be responsible for a significant chunk of the difficulty I’m perceiving in interfacing between the rationalist and other memeplexes. In both directions, both for the rationalist community learning from other memeplexes, and for useful memes getting from rationalist circles into the outside world.
Hah, this makes a lot of sense. Thanks!
An addition to that: If we look through the goggles of Sara Ness’ Relating Languages, the rationalist style of doing conversations is at the far end of the internal-focusing dialects Debater/Chronicler/Scientist. In my experience, more gooey communities have way more Banterer/Bard/Spaceholder-heavy types of interactions, which focus more on peoples’ needs in the situation than on forming and communicating true beliefs. People don’t necessarily know which dialects they speak themselves, because their way of interacting just feels normal to them, and everyone else weird. It’s hard to learn speak in dialects that are not your natural default. For example, I didn’t even notice myself slipping into Bard/Banterer during writing this post, but in hindsight it’s fairly obvious how it digresses from the LessWrong language game.
I think the LW-way is ideal for its purpose, but I’m realizing that there’s a whole lot of tacit knowledge and implicit norms involved in understanding and doing it. This strong selection for a particular style of communication may be responsible for a significant chunk of the difficulty I’m perceiving in interfacing between the rationalist and other memeplexes. In both directions, both for the rationalist community learning from other memeplexes, and for useful memes getting from rationalist circles into the outside world.